Pre-course work, due for day 1

Reading Assignments:

Before the class starts, please read the following chapters in the following boo ks: Then choose one book to read in its entirety. Please arrange things so that each book is read by at least two people. There are at least four copies of each book on the table in the pedagogy lab. Your card should get you access to that room.

Writing Assignments:

  1. Write a page or two about your goals for yourself as a teacher. What sort of teacher do you want to be? What do you need to learn, how do you need to gro w, to be that teacher? This piece, unaltered (so as to capture your perspective at the beginning of the course), will be part of your course portfolio, so treat it as a final draft.
  2. Choose a mathematics course you have recently taken (not a reading course). Consider how it was taught, how you learned the material, how you felt about it. Write an essay (5-10 pages) analyzing the course and your personal experien ce in it from the perspective of the book you read (Duckworth, Skemp, or Zull). What does the author bring to the discussion? How would you analyze the course, from both teaching and learning standpoints, in terms of his or her ideas? And finally, what do you think about it?

    A good paper will analyze a course in terms of two or three of the most central ideas from the book, in depth, supported with specific details, both objective and subjective (your experience as a student is highly relevant). You do not have to agree with the book in order to write an analysis from its perspective, but you do have to engage seriously with it. For one possible example, one of the important ideas in Zull's book is the learning cycle. If you are analyzing a course from the perspective of this idea, you can start by identifying the way s in which the course did or did not lead you as a student to move through all par ts of the learning cycle, go on to talk about how this should have (according to Zull's model) affected your learning, and conclude by talking about whether your experience agrees with this model, and why or why not.